Definition of "bosom"
bosom
noun
plural bosoms
(anatomy, somewhat dated) The breast or chest of a human (or sometimes of another animal).
Quotations
Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes. […] She put back a truant curl from her forehead where it had sought egress to the world, and looked him full in the face now, drawing a deep breath which caused the round of her bosom to lift the lace at her throat.
1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
The seat of one's inner thoughts, feelings, etc.; one's secret feelings; desire.
Quotations
my poor dear duke […], in consequence of the excitement created in his august bosom by her frantic violence and grief, had a fit in which I very nigh lost him.
1844 January–December, W[illiam] M[akepeace] Thackeray, “The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. [The Luck of Barry Lyndon.]”, in Miscellanies: Prose and Verse, volume III, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1856
The protected interior or inner part of something; the area enclosed as by an embrace.
Quotations
there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
1861, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter I, in Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, part I, page 1
A breast, one of a woman's breasts
Quotations
The prevailing look at Aintree was of a well-upholstered woman wearing an outfit about three sizes too small for her; trouser suits so tight you could not only tell if the lady had a coin in her pocket but see if it was heads or tails, and skimpy tops proclaiming proudly that bosoms are back—and this time it's personal.
2003 April 7, Martin Kelner, The Guardian
adjective
not comparable
Quotations
Lieut. Creecy of the navy, who has been detailed to the aerial experiments at the fort, and who was a bosom companion of young Selfridge, was brokenhearted.
1908 September 18, “Fatal fall of Wright airship”, in New York Times, Describing the death of Thomas Etholen Selfridge, first airplane fatality in history
verb
third-person singular simple present bosoms, present participle bosoming, simple past and past participle bosomed
(intransitive) To belly; to billow, swell or bulge.
Quotations
What Stewart called a “langtailie coat” spread out behind him like streamers in a breeze, a “biled” collar had, in the same gentleman’s terse language, “burst its moorings” and projected in two miniature wings at the back of his ears, and a shirt that had once been white, bosomed out expansively through an open vest.
1905, Alex Macdonald, In Search of El Dorado, London: T. Fisher Unwin, Part II, “The Five-Mile Rush,” p. 92
(transitive) To belly; to cause to billow, swell or bulge.
Quotations
I looked again, and though I was sensible it must be a delusion brought on by the stroke of his powerful rod, yet I did see the appearance of a glorious fleet of ships coming bounding along the surface of the firmament of air, while every mainsail was bosomed out like the side of a Highland mountain.
1822, James Hogg, The Three Perils of Man, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Volume 3, Chapter 12, pp. 440-441
Thus one by one they mount, and spreading wide, / The transverse wings extend on either side, / And, lightly bosomed by the gentle gale, / She seems a moving pyramid of ail.
1855, The Scald [pseudonym of George Smellie], “Sketches of a Voyage to Hudson’s Bay” in The Sea: Sketches of a Voyage to Hudson’s Bay, and Other Poems, London: Hope & Co., p. 45